Futon Life, chapter 3

When last we left our hero (a cotton-fibre sleeping mattress), it was becoming lonely and thinking longingly of tatami mats to rest upon. Now read on.

Futon Life, chapter 2

When last we left our hero (a cotton-fibre sleeping mattress), it had at last completed its lengthy journey from Japan to my flat, and was being aired in the sun. Now read on...

London Crossover Adventure!

So a few weeks ago,* I was delighted to hear that one of my classmates from GenkiJACS would be visiting London! Regular readers may remember M-san of okonomiyaki fame, who is also Miho-san of internet fame. The word "charming" was practically invented for Miho-san, so of course I was happy to take a trip down to London and do some touristing with her and a couple of her friends.

* I started writing this post nearer the time, but it's actually four months ago now.

For any non-British Isles readers, London is nowhere near my hometown (which is near Liverpool) - it's about two hundred miles away. It's also horrifically expensive to go to London, because (inexplicably in my view) it's incredibly popular. To make the most of the time, I decided to go the previous evening so we could meet up in the morning, and also so I wouldn't be spending half a day travelling there and back.

After much frustrating searching, I happened upon the Swinton Hotel. It does exactly what it says on the tin: it's a cheap, no frills hotel that's near King's Cross. Providing what you need is a place to sleep and a bathroom, it's got you covered. No photos this time: honestly, it wouldn't be worth it. It looks like a very small room with a small bed in it, and the kind of carpet they put in very cheap hotels. It was fine.

Study at GenkiJACS free for a year!

Two big bits of news have just come out of GenkiJACS.

First, the Fukuoka school have managed to get accreditation from the government, which means they can offer student visas. This is potentially really useful. Firstly, it means you can stay for longer than three months without having to worry about getting your no-visa entry permit renewed. It isn't a huge concern, but the fact that it's possible for a hiccup to occur is always a worry. Secondly, it means you can stay for up to a year, so people looking for essentially a gap year experience can do that without having to burn up their once-in-a-lifetime Working Holiday Visa (and you can't even guarantee you'll get one).

Thirdly, it allows you to work! This wouldn't really have been a concern for me, I think, but for some people might be a big deal. Fourthly, you can get student discounts on all kinds of things. And fifthly, you can register as a Japanese resident, and therefore open bank accounts and so on. So this has the potential to be just really convenient for a lot of people.

The other, related big news is that to celebrate, they're offering a YEAR of free tuition at GenkiJACS. Yeah, I know, amazing. Sadly I'm not eligible because my level of Japanese is too high(!)* but it's a fantastic opportunity for someone. The downside? You have to produce a short video explaining why you want to study at GenkiJACS, which... well, I don't think that's something I'd have felt comfortable doing even if I were eligible. It's got that vaguely self-promoting, interview-style feel to it that I tend to associate with corporate America.

Hmm. It'd be vaguely interesting to know how varying cultural norms and preferences would affect potential applicants' willingness to go in for a competition like this.

*it really does feel weird to say that!

Futon Life, chapter 1

So the last, oh, two months of almost total silence aren't just me running out of things to say. I've actually been moving across country to start my new job in sunny glamorous really quite nice Sheffield.

I eventually managed to find a rather nice attic flat over some shops in a bustling part of town, with half an hour's walk of the town centre and my job. This relatively modern, well-maintained １ＬＤ・Ｋ* costs only slightly more than the single room I was renting in a cramped Victorian house in Oxford. There's that North-South divide for ya.

* Japanese real estate shorthand: 1 room, living-dining-room, and kitchen.

Ever since I started planning the move, I've been seriously considering getting a futon. A little clarification is needed here, because English has decided to be really annoying in that way it sometimes is with loanwords. See, a futon as we know it in the UK is almost (but not quite) entirely different from the Japanese futon that we stole the word from.

A Shimmin at Home

So this summer, an old friend came back to visit. Last time we met was in Japan! This time, she was visiting Oxford, but also decided to come up with me and visit my home turf on the Wirral, which is to say Merseyside, which is to say north-western England. For those of you following along at home, that's one of the parts of the UK that is not London.

Chester

We had a nice few days exploring the two nearby cities, Chester and Liverpool. Chester doesn't really have much to do per se, but it's a nice place to walk around and look at old things.

I always feel that the Chester city council completely fumbled things for the past few decades, and missed out on opportunities. They spent ages trying to market Chester as a Roman City!!!, when there's actually not much Roman left of it, and various other cities can do that better. I mean, it has city walls, which are quite nice to walk around - although all the gates were demolished centuries ago, and big roads now cut through the old walls. There's an amphitheatre, which is unusual and exciting, except that all that's left is a semi-circle of stone, because one half of the amphitheatre is covered by a 1730 house (the amphitheatre was buried and unknown at the time) and a much less forgiveable courthouse, built in 2000. Yes, you read that right. The county council knowingly built over a unique-in-Britain Roman amphitheatre again a mere fifteen years ago.

"The Roman Amphitheatre, Deva Victrix (Chester, UK) (8392242886)" by Carole Raddato from FRANKFURT, Germany - The Roman Amphitheatre, Deva Victrix (Chester, UK) Uploaded by Marcus Cyron. Licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0 via Wikimedia Commons.

In fairness, the council has at least been consistent, since in the 60s and 70s they presided over the bulldozing of loads of Roman ruins to build a new shopping centre, which currently appears to be on a slow slide into Poundland-dom. Well done, Council.

What Chester does have going for it is an amazing sweep of history. Aside from the once-impressive Roman ruins, it has a unique set of mediaeval rows, which are still the coolest part of the shopping experience. These would be a far more interesting tourist experience if they hadn't been allowed, at some point in history, to rip down the fronts and erect ugly plastic things with massive glass windows. Still, the bits above are quite nice. There are cool Georgian townhouses, and Victorian civic buildings, including some cool parks. As a historic city in general, and a nice place to walk around, Chester is pretty good.

"Chester - Rows 3" by Wolfgang Sauber - Own work. Licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons.

There's not much the council could do about their various idiocies now, although personally I'd be trying to press for shops to restore mediaevalesque fronts along the rows, and generally boost the historicity of the area to encourage tourist, because frankly Chester doesn't have much else going for it.

Oh wait, yes it does...

Chester Zoo

Dragonfly! And we aren't even in the zoo yet

SC was really excited by the red panda. It seemed weird at the time because, y'know, China, but then I don't exactly see a lot of white-tailed sea eagles, pine martens, or moles.

The skies looked kindly on us, so we had pretty good weather for our day at the zoo. Good thing too, because going around it takes hours. I've never actually visited the whole zoo in one day, and this would be no exception. It's simply too big to do that, and if you did, you wouldn't really get to appreciate any animals.

It's hard to see here, but the closest log is actually a giant otter! They were so cool and playful.

So many cool fish, so few acceptable photos

This fish just looks incredibly dorky, it's like a cartoon fish from a kids' film. It would be called Billy-Joe and done with an American hick accent.

One of my favourite animals :P

Turtles! So cute. Feel the love.

SC doesn't really like being photographed, which makes no sense, because just look:

But we got that momento at the elephant enclosure, anyway, though sadly no elephants with it. There were some there, though, including the so-cute baby elephant.

Liverpool

In Liverpool, dear SC was keen to explore some of the museums, so we headed down to the waterfront past the Three Graces. Liverpool had the sense to scrap ideas for a Fourth Grace, which would have looked like this:.

Yes, this spaceship is the perfect accompaniment to three neoclassical buildings, don't you think?

Anyway, instead we ended up with the Museum of Liverpool building itself and the Mann Island buildings (sometimes compared to a loose bin-bag that has draped itself across some classical architecture. Hey, they're still better than the Tissue Box on the Stairs.

Where was I going with this?

So yes, we ended up visiting the International Museum of Slavery. This is a really good museum that you should visit if you're in Liverpool. Be warned, though, if the name hasn't given it way: this is a really depressing place. As it happens, I'd already visited a few weeks earlier when another friend was in town, and I've been a couple of times previously, so I know it pretty well. This mostly serves to emphasise its depressing aspects.

As usual on our expeditions, my education was thoroughly tested as SC pried me with questions about the museum and the history. Presumably the history of Anglo-American slavery isn't a major curriculum topic in China. I spend an hour or so discussing the history of slavery, with an emphasis on how the version adopted by the Anglo-American access was particularly abominable, and how the great and good of Liverpool were particularly reluctant to abolish it as it was the source of most of their money. My brain was thoroughly racked by the time we left. With her usual adroitness, SC found another exhibition downstairs about poor children being shipped off to Canada and Australia, only a few decades ago, which was frankly only a little bit less gruelling.

On the plus side, it was now lunchtime, which gave the opportunity to introduce SC to scouse. She wasn't very keen on beetroot, which is a terrible shame, because scouse without beetroot is a mockery; but she seemed to enjoy the scouse itself. We also had some dandelion and burdock, which I don't think she liked much. It seemed sweeter than I remembered; I wonder if the recipe's changed with changing tastes?

Afterwards, we moved onto the Museum of Liverpool, where I got to explain the Global City exhibit and discuss exploitation of the colonies, various contemptuous remarks about foreigners by historical figures reproduced here, the Opium Wars, and the bit where Chinese sailors who'd lived in the city for decades, helped the war effort and had families here were rounded up secretly and shipped back to China after WWII by the government for daring to request equal wages with white people, leaving their families to believe they'd drowned or suddenly run off. This only came to light a few years ago, in 1999, when some of the children investigated, because the Home Office certainly weren't going to admit it. Don't ya just love this country?

All politicians should have to regularly spend a day escorting foreign tourists around museums. It's a very humbling experience!

So that was a cheerful day! Things got a bit less melancholy when we wandered around the Albert Docks and through Liverpool a bit. SC has what I always call rather gloomy tastes (love ya really!) but it's always really interesting talking through things with someone who has a different perspective on things. To my surprise, she actually blamed the British less for the Opium Wars than the museum did. We also had a nice sit-down in the old overhead railway. Annoyingly, it closed recently enough that all the images of it are still in copyright, and nobody has thought to make any available publicly. Boo.

An Unexpected Return

We had some fond and not-quite tearful farewells as SC headed off to visit other friends, so I was quite surprised the next weekend to hear that she was back, staying in the next village over. Primarily, I was surprised because she was back at all, although a not-inconsiderable portion of surprise was reserved for the notion of anyone voluntarily staying in my actual hometown, a place legendarily devoid of interest. But of course, I was delighted.

We had a pretty quiet time these last couple of days, as I was very occupied with family stuff. Still, we had time for some nice chats, and paid a farewell visit to Chester, where we walked around the walls and cathedral again. This was an invaluable opportunity to brush up on my ecclesiastical architecture, church history, and comparative theology (still love ya really!), and the weather was a bit nicer this time.

"Chester Cathedral (South View)" by Yahra - Own work. Licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons.

"Chester Cathedral (12643600644)" by Michael D Beckwith - Chester Cathedral. Licensed under CC BY 2.0 via Wikimedia Commons.

Eventually, all good things had to come to an end, so we did a second round of mournful goodbyes. Given SC has visited me twice now, it's definitely my turn to visit next. Beijing, here we come!

Jersey: The Glass Church and abject failure

It is, once again, excessively hot. I am exhausted. It's mostly down to the weather, which has been relentlessly warm, and I'm not great at that (see: everything I wrote about Japan ever). To some extent, though, it's also because I'm having to work fairly hard to find ways to occupy myself. Touristing is relatively hard work, and requires a fair amount of planning because the places are scattered around the island. I can't simply crash in my room and surf the internet or watch films, because that requires sitting in a very specific spot in the garden where I can hope to be connected about 15% of the time. Also, that pesky RSI is stopping me from just writing. So! Today I thought I'd head off to the Hamptonne Country Life Museum. I'm hoping this will be a cool, indoorsy place where I can drink tea and muse gently. I'm also taking my laptop, so that if worse comes to worst I can do some flashcards or something.

Resolution made, I take the bus through Millbrook, where I remember as we pass it St Matthew’s Glass Church, which I intended to find out about but forgot. Millbrook is the place to change buses for the HCL anyway, so I hop off at next stop and wander back. The church is... not quite what I expected. I'd been envisioning a church that was actually glass - maybe a glittering stained-glass marvel along the lines of Paddy's Wigwam, or a chapel made of huge panes of glass and full of light? Perhaps an ordinary church fill to the brim with elaborate glass ornaments? But getting a brown sign isn't a sign of being a major monument, but a place of possible interest to tourists. We have to take scale into account. Jersey is a relatively small place, so it's not likely to have a large number of major attractions: the handful of castles and museums it has easily meet quota. The Glass Church doesn't pretend to be anything major, I just leaped to that conclusion because it's mentioned. As a small and isolated place with a relatively small population, little interesting places are going to seem more prominent than they might in a major urban area.

So, the Glass Church is a place where some fixtures are made of glass. It's perfectly pleasant, worth sticking your head round, but not particularly fascinating to be honest unless you're really into church architecture.

Having done that, I decide to get te bus to the HCL. This is where things fall apart, because after much traipsing I finally find a bus stop - which is to say, a pole. The stops on the other side of the road are proper stone shelters, in the shade, with seats. They look really comfortable. This is a notice nailed to a pole in the sunniest part of the street. It is deeply uninformative. It lists the numbers of buses, with the ultimate destinations. I’m sure it’s useful if you’re a local, but there is no indication whatsoever of where any of these buses actually go along the way. Diligently, I try looking at the four different maps I own, but this doesn’t enlighten me, because none of these ultimate destinations appear on the maps. Apparently they are either too unimportant, or they're the name of a specific part of a small town. This leaves the option of either stopping every bus which passes to ask if they go where I want, or walking.

Looking at the timetable, it will be over an hour before all possible bus numbers have passed, and so on average it's likely to take me at least half an hour of waiting. It's really very hot. After much consideration I try to walk. It’s only a couple of miles, right?

This is a mistake.

I find a road sign indicating the Hamptonne Country Life Museum, and bein walking. After a few yards, the pavements disappear. Hey, who needs pavements? It’s not as though humans walk. Certainly not in Jersey, it would seem. The road becomes steep, and increasingly winding. As I try to navigate around a corner, two huge lorries thunder past from opposite sides, drivers gawping at me in incomprehension. I am, shall we say, uncomfortable with this. The road seems to grow steeper as I walk, until I might be traipsing up a cliff. Heat shimmers off the road. Sharp-angled driveways appear behind me, disgorging unexpected vehicles. I feel increasingly like an FPS protagonist surrounded by spawn points.

After a few minutes of this, I give up and turn around for my own safety.

I was really hoping the Millbrook change would be a sensible move; it means only taking the bus halfway to St. Helier, which means only spending 20 minutes rather than the full 40 minutes needed to cover to cover the 5ish miles between the two towns.*

* Horrifyingly, I can reliably run this distance faster than the bus covers it.

Now it looks as if unless you know exactly what you’re doing, the only sensible thing to do is go to St. H and get the bus there. But this walking thing is obviously not going to be enjoyable whatsoever. I give up. Stuff this visiting places lark; if they can’t be bothered to make it easy for tourists (a supposedly significant part of their economy) to get to places, I will not visit them. The museum sounded vaguely interesting, but I’m not risking life and limb to get there due to lack of information on the buses. I'm really quite fed up about this, but I’m just going to St. Helier to sit in a café or something. Defeatist, perhaps. I could go to St. Helier and get the bus from there, but by that point it would be lunchtime. My experiences at Castle Elizabeth warn me against expecting to eat at a tourist attraction in Jersey. If I wait until after lunch, by the time I can get to the museum the place will be practically ready to close. I’m going to give up on visiting anything and just go somewhere to read. Well done, Jersey.

So I do. I tote my bag over to the library, and study flashcards in the cool. I'm actually incredibly tired, from the heat and from the effort of touristing. Always having to think up ways to occupy myself and search for meals is exhausting; the meals in particular have been difficult, because it’s too hot for me to eat the big restauranty meals, and the choice in most places has been extremely limited, so there's been a lot of traipsing around.

I make a token effort to try going to the museum in the afternoon, after a lightish meal at M&S, and then just give up. I don’t really want to go to another museum. I’m hot and exhausted. If I were at home, I’d just curl up and try to nap. I’m basically stuck in town until I get a bus to the hotel, then I’ll be stuck in the hotel, so I try to make the best of it and just go back to the library. And that’s basically it.

I spend the day studying, reading and listening to podcasts. Rather than scout around for food yet again, I have sudden inspiration and pick up some bits from M&S again. I’m once again astounded at the dearth of bread rolls in Jersey,* but do find a couple here, and some fruit salad. That’s about all I can imagine eating. Despite being far milder than Fukuoka, the weather has done a number on me.

It's mysteriously like Japan, possibly from joint French influence? I can find large loaves of bread here, which are far more than I could possibly eat, but small items seem to be exclusively brioche. I've nothing against brioche, but I'm not going to make a sandwich out of it, because it's cake. And I do try not to eat cake for every meal.

In the evening, when it’s cooled off a bit, I have a stroll around. I never did see the supposed coastal path south-west of St Aubin, and there’s still no sign of it (in both senses of the word), but I wander through the streets a bit. I watch the first half of Tokyo Sonata, which I’ve had lying around from Lovefilm for about three months now and never got round to. As I had feared, it’s rather depressing, but not overwhelmingly so, and I’ll probably finish it.

I never did. I kept it for another couple of months, and never mustered the enthusiasm to watch the rest. I started once, realised the rest of it was just going to be more of the same, and gave up after yet another scene of family arguments. The synopsis I read makes me glad I did. I've already got a taste of the film, and my tolerance for things which are stylish but grim is quite low. The last part of the film simply seems to be weird. I can't be bothered. I sent it back.

Everyone else has disappeared by now, but I venture back out into the garden. It’s dark, cool, and peaceful, apart from the inescapable gurring of traffic and distant whooping from someone or other. The church below stands out as a dark and elegant shape, painted in chocolate light and shadow by a streetlamp. There are lights strung out all along the bay as it curves off to St. Helier and melts away into the distant Elizabeth Castle. St. Aubin’s own little islet fort juts out into the sea to the right, giving them the look of two lovers calling to one another across the bay.

A faint rain begins to fall, speckling my skin softly like the kisses of ghosts. The day is over.

Jersey: Elizabeth Castle

Thursday rolls around. Today's breakfast special is pancakes. There's two options, with maple syrup and bacon, or with fruit and créme fraiche. I'm hesitating, weighing up whether I actually want a pancake, and can I get it without créme fraiche, because why would you put white goop that tastes of literally nothing on things? The landlady mistakes this for indecision, and announces that she will bring me both pancakes. This is extremely kind of her, even though I don't actually want two. I end up with a very large breakfast - sadly I didn't have my camera with me.

I've never had bacon and maple syrup together, because... well, for the same reason I haven't had roast beef with chocolate sauce, which is to say, why would you do that? It's not revolting or anything, but it's distinctly weird and I don't plan to repeat it.

My original plan for today was, as suggested by the nice couple last night, to get the bus up to Letacq and get some walking done. When I check the forecast, though, I discover it's going to be the worst possible day for that. It's due to be 30C and above, and blazing sunlight. The walk they suggested is along the coastline, and seems to have very little in the way of shade. It's all countryside, with settlements generally 1km away at a minimum, and I don't know the area at all. In the circumstances, going for a walk by myself seems like an open invitation to heatstroke. Since I'm also prone to migraines induced by bright light, overheating or dehydration, and really don't want to succumb to a hallucinatory episode somewhere I'm also liable to get heatstroke, I decide to leave this for another day.

Instead, I'm going back to St. Helier and aiming to visit Elizabeth Castle. My plan is to get my postcards sent off, then stroll over the causeway late morning, having lunch in the castle café. I hope to have time to reach Le Hogue Bie this afternoon, but we'll see. They all seem to be relatively modest tourist sites here, so an hour or two is generally enough (and that's fine by me).

Well, I get my postcards sent off. I wrote most of them yesterday while lizard-watching, and spend a small fortune buying thirty-odd stamps to Japan, China, Germany and even a few for the UK. The nice lady at the post office is impressed.

Cards posted, I stride down to the seafront, enjoying the breeze and the nice cheerful horror literature podcast playing in my ears, as I head towards the causeway. Which... isn't there.

It turns out that the route to the castle is on a tidal causeway. I had envisioned just a raised path leading there - given the place was occupied by the Germans, and is now a tourist site, and I'd seen photos of people walking there, I had no question in my mind. Never occurred to me to doubt this. I suppose I assumed either that it was situated at the end of a natural outcrop that was walkable, or that a road had been built at some point. But no. You can only reach the castle on footwhen the tide is down; and because it's currently a neap tide, it won't be possible today or tomorrow.

This seems like the kind of information that should be made incredibly prominent everywhere, because generally people don't go around assuming that major tourist destinations might randomly be inaccessible depending on astronomic cycles. Don't bury that information in a detail paragraph somewhere in a guidebook - put it on the freaking sign. If all you have is a sign saying "castle this way", I tend to assume - not, I think, unreasonably - that if I go in that direction, I will be able to reach the castle.

After much bewildered wandering around, I discover that what you need to do instead is get a little shuttle ferry. There are two, but they don't seem to coordinate efforts, I think they just take it in turns to go or something? Or maybe one is a backup. The next available ferry seat turns out to be in 45 minutes away, by which point I was hoping to be in a tearoom in the castle, since the walk would only take about 10 minutes. I end up going around the corner to La Fregate, where I find a scone and an apple to keep me going. It's not particularly restful, because I'm stressing about getting to the castle and my plans being thrown off, but it is at least in the shade.

I finally manage to get on a ferry around 12.20. By this point, I'm guessing I won't be able to do much else today. Being tied to the ferries is meaning a lot of wasted time sitting around, so I might as well make the most of the castle.

The ferry is pretty cool, though. There's a safety video inside, which is done by a group of historical recreationists being the local militia, and is really pretty gun as these things go.

Some seagulls are nesting in the window, the first thing I saw when I arrived.

All the cannon lined up.

An observation post.

Just a nice little view of an islet through the tower window.

It's hard to convey just how sunny it is here. I felt really sorry for the soldiers training in this heat on this baking, open courtyard.

Instructions for musket drill.

There are lovely beaches around here, although they look hard to get to.

Flowers now sprout all over the castle grounds. Like Mont Orgueil, it's probably a good habitat for rare species, although it's been disturbed more recently by the war.

This is a pretty tourist-brochure-y photo right here.

The castle is an odd experience - there's the old, esoteric parts that you come to expect from castles, but it's cut through with modernisations, because it was occupied by the Germans when they took over the island in the second world war. As a result, concrete is everywhere. This feels very odd, but it's probably not significantly different from how castles used to change over the centuries. Most castles have been heavily redesigned over their lives, it's just that in most cases they became redundant as defences so long ago that we don't really notice these discrepancies. The stone/concrete distinction just happens to be broad enough and modern enough to be obvious.

A concrete bunker has been added here.

The work on the castle was mostly done by slave labour, it seems. Things were really pretty bad on Jersey, one of the last places to be freed. I assume that for the Allies, the work and risk required to recapture a small and very well-defended outpost was inefficient compared to the gains that could be made on the mainland for the same effort. As a result, the population were starving and in very bad straits.

Although of course I'm very sorry for the forced labourers, I also feel quite sorry for the German soldiers seeing this. The castle was set up with a full hospital, central heating and other advanced facilities, but this would not be a fun place to spend your time either. They must also have been in constant fear of the Allies landing, and of the population who presumably hated their guts.

This is a ranging chart for the gunners, showing nearby islets and rocks to help them judge the ballistics needed to hit an enemy vessel.

It's quite exhausting wandering around the castle. It's interesting enough, but I have seen an awful lot of castles in my time, to be honest. The heat is so intense that I'm very glad of the brief trips inside, though the bunker-style sections are really cramped and unpleasant. It's too hot to sit outside and enjoy reading or anything, so I go to the cafe, seeking lunch.

Here, following on from my experience at Mont Orgueil, I realise that cafes in Jersey museums cannot be depended on as a source of food. It's basically tea, coffee and cake here. That's great for snacks, and I gladly order a cup of tea, but there's not really much that's lunchable here, and I am trying not to live on cake. There are some sandwiches (from what I remember) but I don't trust bought sandwiches not to have butter, mayonnaise and other inedibles in.

I suppose I'm basically used to a National Trust style of visitor centre, where there are typically little cafe-restaurants attached to historic sites, catering (literally!) to people who are coming for a day out. These do tend to provide at least simple meals, and in many cases quite substantial ones. The Jersey tourist market is apparently different, perhaps due to the scale of the island, which means people will often be visiting from only a few minutes' travel away and you're always close to an actual restaurant. I'd be quite interested in the actual economics, but alas, I have no way of knowing what they are.

It's also possible, of course, that the space and facilities available simply don't allow them to do full meals. For Elizabeth Castle, at least, that seems unlikely, since it must have had a substantial kitchen for the German troops. Still, that might be unusable by now, or just not comply with modern hygiene regulations.

In the case of Elizabeth Castle, that's a bit of a problem, since you're completely cut off from sources of food by the sea! It's clearly not sensible to go back for lunch and come over again, so I decide to slightly extend my wanderings and then simply head back for lunch. This pretty much puts the kibosh on visiting anywhere else today - it's already well past two, and by the time I've tracked down an eatery and got some food, it'll be far too late to visit a museum that's a bus journey away.

I take the ferry back, and from what I remember, I end up eating in a Marks & Spencer café. Afterwards, I find a slightly-less sunny bit of seafront and just lounge on the grass, listening to my podcasts and dozing gently. It's quite pleasant and restful. I eventually head back to Sweet Heaven, a cafe I end up visiting half a dozen times during my trip to Jersey.

cafe

cake

Spiced fruit cake. It was delicious.

I head back to St. Aubin, and sketch a bit in the gardens. I ate pretty late already, but I do need food eventually, and decide to just go to the nearby Murray's for a bite, as they seem to do small and simple meals. I order a baked potato and some salad. It turns out the potato comes with salad, and it's the same salad, which means I eat an inordinate quantity of leaves alongside my potato. Still, it's all healthy stuff, right? There's also a very pleasant non-alcoholic beer.

One thing has come up quite frequently on this trip - I'm wondering, where do the local residents go when they want a relatively simple meal out? Or in fact, do the demographics (it seems pretty posh to me) and the continental influence combine to mean that isn't really a concern? I know that my family and I would soon find the All Bistros All The Time setup a bit overwhelming, and would welcome some simpler food that wasn't three courses and rich sauces, but perhaps Jersey people don't feel that way. In fairness, there are pizza shops and takeaways, so it's not all expensive; what I'm not seeing here is what we'd call pub grub, which is to say, a relatively simple and nutritious cooked meal. If you want to eat healthily but cheaply here, I'm not really seeing many options.

Jersey: Mont Orgueil and the Salty Dog Bistro

My plan for today, Wednesday, is to leave my rather heavy bag here and head off to Mt. Orgueil. Apparently it’s quite big, with a tearoom, and there’s a garden centre with another café nearby. I’m planning a quiet day, pottering and reading an Arthur Machen book. I’ve picked up a new sketchbook and vaguely plan to sketch, though whether I will get round to it is hard to tell.

Another snag has cropped up unexpectedly. As I ate breakfast and tried to sort out a few emails, I had a sudden flare-up of my RSI that made it virtually impossible to operate the computer. I’m not sure whether sketching and so on will actually be feasible either. I’m very conscious of my hands right now and hoping they’ll recover soon! This has the awkward side-effect of making it very difficult to take any notes for my blog. Luckily, I remembered my trusty voice recorder. What I’ll be doing today, then, is making an audio diary and then transcribing it when I recover.

Jersey: Jersey Zoo (the Gerald Durrell experience)

After my poor night, I greatly disappoint my hosts by judging my stomach too delicate for the otherwise large and tempting breakfast menu, subsisting on cereal, toast and yoghurt. The kippers, porridge, three kinds of rarebit, fruit salad, ham platters, full Jersey breakfasts and so on will have to wait. They make several concerned attempts to dissuade me from this rash course, but I stand firm.

It’s a lovely day out there – crackin’ t’flags as we say. I take the opportunity to ask about getting some help with the internet. Apparently the landlord will be down at half past nine. That’s a bit of a pain because it’s only half past eight right now, and I’d basically intended to head off to St. Helier and attack Tourist Information, but right now I feel like getting this sorted out while I have a chance is a bit of a priority. Not having internet in my hotel means it’s incredibly difficult to do basic research.

I sit in my room sipping camomile tea and practicing Japanese flashcards. At half past nine, I find mine host in the garden, and discuss wi-fi. It turns out that, although there are four different networks in the hotel, two of them have started demanding passwords unknown even to the owners. Naturally, the only wi-fi available in my room is one of these – it didn’t actually demand a password, which puzzles me, it just refused to do anything. I’m also bemused as to why my ground-floor room only found what’s supposed to be the third-floor internet. Something to do with the hotel being built of granite, apparently. Anyway, the long and the short of it is that I can now use the internet, providing I do so in the garden.

Jersey: arrival

So, it’s currently one year since I had a job. Admittedly, six months of that was spent studying in Japan, but I have to say this was not really how I intended things to go. Between frustration, nice weather and opportunity, I decide to chuck in the job-applying shtick for a few days and take a little break.

Around twenty-two years ago, I encountered the works of Gerald Durrell and immediately became captivated. The zoo books, I mean – the family ones are decent, but it was the anecdotes of animal collecting, conservation and zoos that really gripped me. I ended up studying zoology more or less on the back of this, only to veer wildly away when it finally became clear to me, mid-course, that almost no part of a zoology degree would deign to consider any part of an animal larger than a single cell. Since this was precisely the opposite of what I cared about (my rule of thumb is ‘at least as big as an ant’) I felt rather cheated by the whole business. University prospectuses have, amongst their other failings, a habit of not really telling you much about what you will actually be studying, apparently assuming that prospective students already know this, despite being, y’know, prospective.

Anyway! For several years now my family have adopted a frog at Jersey Zoo for me each birthday, and I’ve received a free one-day pass to the zoo which I never managed to use. This comes of living hundreds of miles away and having nobody to go on holiday with. My brother and I had vaguely planned to go together for the last few years, but this was foiled by the (otherwise welcome) arrival of a niece. Mine, not his. Well, you know what I mean.

Sending books

Oh hi there.

Since I've now been out of Japan for nearly six months, you might be forgiven for assuming there's nothing left to write. Wrong. I'm still catching up on half-drafted posts.

One of the things I did in Japan was bookshopping. I'm, um, a fairly voracious reader - I normally have over a hundred books waiting to be read, and get through a hundred or so in a year. Reading more manga recently (for insight into Japan and its culture, initially, and then just because it's fun) skew things towards bigger numbers, but reading a lot in Japanese pushes things very much the other way!

Anyway, surrounded as I was by Book Off and other cheapo bookshops, I dug in. It may be hard to work out the appeal, considering the hassle it'll be to get them home. Well, here, let me explain.

Makizushi'd

As you can see, I started this post months ago in Japan. Still working through that backlog...

So it seems silly to spend six months in Japan without learning to make at least one national dish, right? Let's pick an easy one.

Having already tried this out in cooking class, I knew basically what to do, but wanted to try making makizushi from scratch. It has a lot of advantages. It's healthy, relatively straightforward, you can make it in advance (or at least, some of the prep can be done ahead of time) and it makes a decent lunch that doesn't require reheating.

Bowl of rice! For my first attempt, I didn't have any sushi rice. This caused some problems.

年賀状びっくりなんだ

I've been having a pretty grim time of it here applying for jobs. Unfortunately, my Japanese isn't good enough to apply for anything that requires Japanese, so it's of limited help so far. I am, to put it mildly, rather grumpy.

Then I got some delayed post:

とっても感動したんだ。 It really touched me. I won't show the back, because I don't want to reveal anyone's names and editing out the personal bits wouldn't leave much, but that was even more touching. All the staff from the cafe wrote with their best wishes. I miss them very much!

Just in case either of them are reading this blog, I should mention that I had New Year cards from two other Japanese friends as well. I was happy to get both of them too! I think the reason this particular one touched me so much was that it was unexpected. You sort of expect that family and close friends will do nice things for you, and so it's not a surprise when they do, even though you appreciate it. When someone you don't know particularly well does something very kind, it's unexpectedly moving.

Lots of warm fuzzies over here!

Adapting to classroom learning

Before coming to GenkiJACS, I studied first through audio courses, then in one-to-one lessons with a tutor, mostly once a week. At the school, there are typically four hours of lessons a day (on the standard course) in groups of 5-6. This is a bit of a difference, and takes some getting used to.

The most obvious thing is, you're not the centre of attention. This may be a plus or a minus for you; when I started with my tutor, I was initially stressed by having all the expectation on me, but got used to it. In a classroom, you get proportionally less feedback and monitoring because you only answer about 1/classmates of the questions. It's a little easier for you to fade away and (deliberately or subconsciously) avoid things you find hard, because someone else may pipe up, or the teacher may turn to someone else. This reduces stress, but of course it also means you're not necessarily going to overcome those fears.

Culture Class: Tea Ceremony

The final entry in my GenkiJACS culture class series! Not only because I've left Japan and am now catching up; but also because I did just about everything I was interested in during my six months.

Tea ceremony! This was something I'd been wanting to do throughout the stay, but somehow it always ended up scheduled when I wasn't available - in class, in Korea, ill... so I was anxious about getting on the last slot, just two days before I left school. Thankfully, this time it came together. In fact, due to the incentive scheme* for writing about your trip, I actually got to do this for free! It would have been shameful (to me, anyway) to get through six months in Japan without taking part in tea ceremony, nor wearing yukata or kimono even once.

* The school encourages people to write about their trip, and you can get credit for blogposts relevant to the school. I should emphasise (for fear of my reputation being besmirched) that this is guaranteed not subject to review or censorship. I simply wrote blogposts and sent a link to the school; they checked the posts were relevant, and gave appropriate credit. Not sure what would happen if you wrote anything particularly offensive, because I didn't.

End-of-trip reflections

So, now that I've finished, come home and had some time to digest it all, I wanted to reflect a bit on my whole six months at GenkiJACS, coming back to my feelings in the half-term update. I'm also looking at the evaluation form I completed at the end of my stay, although I won't post specific extracts.

While I will mention various negatives, it's always easier to pinpoint problems than things that were good. The latter tend to be vague and diffiuse, the former are often specific.